Women vote for the first time at a polling station in Tahakopa, South Otago, in the historic election of 1893.
Women vote for the first time at a polling station in Tahakopa, South Otago, in the historic election of 1893.
After the battle of more than 20 years for women's suffrage, the ladies of Greymouth on the West Coast turned it into a sprint finish to the voting booth.
No doubt ruffling their ankle-length Victorian skirts, Carrie McPherson and Flora Benyon vied to be the first woman to cast her vote in Greymouth in the parliamentary elections on Tuesday, November 28, 1893.
Next Wednesday is the 125th anniversary of that historic day when New Zealand women became the first in the world to vote for a national parliament.
Flora Benyon, seated at right with her husband, standing, and friends including Premier Richard Seddon, centre and with top hat.
Newspapers, including the Grey River Argus, watched closely in 1893.
"... polling set in briskly as soon as the poll was opened," the Argus observed, "two ladies running a neck and neck race to see who should be the first woman to record a vote for the general election in Greymouth.
"Mrs McPherson, we believe, secured the honour, with Mrs Benyon second."
The first woman to vote in a parliamentary election at the Greymouth booth, Carrie McPherson, with husband Charles. Photo / reynoldmacpherson.ac.nz
Women gaining the vote was a revolution, yet knowledge of the McPherson-Benyon competition was lost in their families - until Victoria University historian Professor Charlotte Macdonald began poking around.
Macdonald noted the sprint finish in a Suffrage Day article last year to mark the September 19, 1893 passing of the women's franchise law.
That was picked up by Judi Mears, a teacher at the Shantytown Heritage Park near Greymouth, who turned to Papers Past and found the Argus article.
Women join the queue at an Auckland polling to choose MPs for the the first time, in the historic election of November 1893.
Armed only with the two racers' surnames, Mears sought help from a genealogy group and studied the historic suffrage petitions, electoral rolls, grave sites and family records to identify the women.
Next she embarked on the difficult job of finding descendants. And now she and an informal Greymouth committee set up to organise 125th suffrage anniversary celebrations have arranged a re-enactment of the race.
A descendant of Benyon's, Jacilyn Miller, and possibly one of McPherson's descendants will today dress up in period costumes to re-create the dash for the polling booth.
The event will also be marked by the planting of a white Kate Sheppard camellia outside the Greymouth library, followed by a march down Mackay St with the Women's Christian Temperance Union and other groups, and speeches by leading West Coast women, including the sole female member of the Grey District Council, Tania Gibson.
Benyon descendant David Miller, Jacilyn's father, said his family hadn't known of the election day race.
Some feared household chaos if women ventured out of their "natural sphere" to participate in politics as shown in this September 1893 cartoon. Image / New Zealand Graphic, National Library
Flora Benyon's husband James was the Mayor of Kumara, a town south of Greymouth, and owned the Kumara Times newspaper. They were friends of the Premier, Richard Seddon, the local MP.
Seddon, who had been a Kumara store keeper and publican, had tried to prevent women's suffrage before the bill passed in the Upper House of Parliament, but later became one of its greatest advocates, after his Liberals won a landslide in the 1893 election.
David Miller said, "It's only conjecture, but I suspect that as friends with the Seddons, Flora may have had some robust discussions with Richard Seddon on the issue of women's suffrage and when the right to vote occurred, she was lining up to try and be the first woman to vote in Seddon's electorate."
Before the suffrage bill passed in the Upper House, opponents had said women didn't want the vote and wouldn't enrol. They were proved wrong.
"From the day of the final passage of the Franchise Bill, suffragists had only six weeks before the rolls were closed in which to prove the allegation incorrect," wrote Patricia Grimshaw in her book Women's Suffrage in New Zealand.
"Before the registrars' doors were opened on the very first day, queues of women formed to enrol, and, once enrolled, suffragists were able to register their fellow electors themselves."
Enrolment facilities were provided at victory thanksgiving meetings, special registration meetings were held, and work parties made house calls.
Sheppard and the franchise leagues were inundated with requests for more forms. By the close of enrolment, more than 100,000 women had registered, about 80 per cent of the adult female population.
Macdonald said all of the suffrage organisation of the preceding years - the gathering of petition signatures, running public meetings and having franchise leagues and branches of the Women's Christian Temperance Union - simply turned to enrolment organisation.
"All of that which had been powering on for several years just rolled on to the next phase of now we've got it now sign up to be on the roll. Of course it then had to be done at such speed because there was so little time between the end of September and the election."
"It's another indicator of how energetic and active and effective that particular political mobilisation was. It underlines again that New Zealand women were not given the vote - that obnoxious phrase - they fought hard to achieve it, including to become enrolled in that September-November period. There's nothing given from on high or just happening through sleight of hand about it."
It took 25 years after this 1894 engraving was published before women could stand for Parliament. Image / New Zealand Graphic, National Library
A persistent theme of women's suffrage opponents was how delicate ladies could cope with the bruising treatment they might receive from men in the polling booth, where drunkenness wasn't uncommon. And there were fears that women's household work could restrict their getting out to vote.
Women's franchise groups provided babysitters and polling booth attendants to assist women voters. Newspapers remarked on the absence of drunkenness and how orderly and good-humoured voters had been, although over-zealous political activists - men and women - were removed from outside one Wellington booth by the police.
Conservative Opposition leader William Rolleston, left, lost his seat when women in 1893 voted in New Zealand parliamentary elections for the first time. Cartoon / New Zealand Mail, National Library
In Christchurch, the Press noted women got out to vote early. "... the ladies took possession of the polling booths immediately on their opening … Ladies filled the side walks leading to the various polling booths, and streamed over into the middle of the road …
"The pretty dresses of the ladies and their smiling faces lighted up the polling booths most wonderfully …"
But a man was removed from the voting spaces at a city booth, twice, for trying to tell his wife, then his daughter, how to vote. "We have no secrets from each other," he protested to a returning officer.
Newspapers, trying to interpret the effect of women voters on the election outcome, noted an important increase in the number of MPs who supported further restricting or banning alcohol.
The issues of alcohol and women's suffrage seemed to coalesce to tip some MPs out.
The defeat in Dunedin of MP Henry Fish - who had probably received liquor industry help to organise petitions against women's suffrage - was termed "another triumph of womanhood" by the Evening Post.
In Napier, which had traditionally been a conservative stronghold, a Liberal MP was elected. "...the women voted against Mr Swan [the conservative Opposition MP] in large numbers because of his occupation of a brewer," a correspondent wrote in Dunedin's Evening Star.
Grimshaw, however, said the Liberal swing could as easily be attributed to changes in men's views, based on the popularity of the Government's land and labour policy, as to the entrance of women voters.
But clearly women had not voted as a bloc for conservative candidates, as had been predicted.
Despite women's the first parliamentary vote, it would be another 26 years before women could be elected to Parliament, 40 before one was, 100 before one became Opposition leader, and 104 before one became prime minister.
1867: Women property holders permitted to vote for some local councils, later extended to all councils.
1869: Mary Muller, wife of a Nelson magistrate, pens a pamphlet advocating votes for women.
1878: First bill allowing women ratepayers to vote and stand in parliamentary elections debated in Parliament. A watered down version passes both Houses but the bill is ditched because of a disagreement related to the Māori vote.
1879-1892: Six attempts at votes for women fail in Parliament.
1882: Women gain vote in elections for liquor licensing committees and in 1885 hospital boards.
1885: Women's Christian Temperance Union established in New Zealand. With Kate Sheppard in a senior role, It becomes a leading voice for women's suffrage.
1887-1893: A series of increasingly large petitions seeking women's suffrage are presented to Parliament.
September 8, 1893: Upper House of Parliament passed a bill containing women's franchise by 20 votes to 18 after two opponents change their minds in anger over Premier Richard Seddon's meddling.
September 19 1893: The bill becomes law, with the assent of Governor Lord Glasgow, making New Zealand the first country in the world in which women can vote for a national parliament.
November 28, 1983: New Zealand's first parliamentary election to include women. Female voter turnout is 82 per cent of those enrolled, compared with 70 per cent of men.
1919: Women gain the right to be elected to Parliament.
